Dead by Daylight has just released its latest update, Chapter 31: All Things Wicked, bringing a new Survivor, Killer, and map for players to enjoy. The new chapter's theme is something of a departure for the horror title, focusing on analog horror to augment its typical jump-scares and adrenaline-fueled chases. With influences ranging from found-footage horror films to Stephen King's perennially cursed town of Derry, Dead by Daylight's latest installment aims to terrify and delight players in equal measure.

Developer Behaviour Interactive opened up about how the game's newest additions—The Unknown, Sable Ward, and Greenville Square—deviate from Dead by Daylight's existing roster of Killers, Survivors, and locales. Creative director Dave Richard and Killer designer Nicolas Barrière-Kucharski shared their influences and ambitions for All Things Wicked in a recent Game ZXC interview.

The Huntress in Dead by Daylight's Lights Out trailer
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DbD Chapter 31: Don't Trust Your Eyes

Dead by Daylight Sable Ward 2

Analog horror is a specific sub-genre of horror fiction focusing on the aesthetics of pre-digital media, which, paradoxically, has become especially popular since the advent of the internet and smartphones. As Richard described it:

"Analog horror has seen a lot of popularity as a sub-genre in the past ten years, with internet access to creepy-pasta and the ability for anyone to shoot their own horror movies with their phone. Analog horror tends to deal with really bizarre or cryptic types of horror that is also very visceral, even though this internet content and cinema analog horror will hide a lot from you."

In many ways, the core tenets of analog horror are misdirection and distortion. Videotapes and TV broadcasts that have been warped by audiovisual decay are mainstays of the sub-genre, which includes web serials such as Marble Hornets and the Netflix series Archive 81. The 1997 film The Blair Witch Project may be the best-known example of the sub-genre, telling a terrifying tale via fragmented video diaries from a team of doomed documentarians searching for a murderous cryptid in the forests of Maryland.

In each of these stories, people must confront the limitations of human understanding, metaphorically represented by man-made media's limited capacity to capture and record eldritch threats. What remains unseen is often more dangerous and frightening than what is explicitly shown, which Behaviour Interactive captures via its new Killer, The Unknown, so-called because it defies explanation and misleads players via a devious hallucination mechanic.

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Most analog horror is predicated on a slow-burn approach to scares as opposed to outright terror, with pressure gradually growing and sanity steadily waning in the face of otherworldly forces. Sometimes, these forces actively erode the fabric of reality, accounting for the static, audio distortions, and other degradation present in analog media. As Barrière-Kucharski described it,

"Analog horror has such a root in sustained horror—something that envelopes you and permeates you. When we started development, something that struck me as super interesting is how analog horror relates to modernity. We have so much information and live in such an enlightened age, but analog horror forces us to reckon with the persistent unknowns and darkness around us."

Analog horror is all about blind spots. Even though humanity's capacity to record, document, and view the world continues to grow with science and technology, there are things that remain out of reach or lurk in the shadows. Dead by Daylight's The Unknown plays with this by spawning hallucinogenic "husks" of itself that are populated throughout the map. The player controlling the Killer can teleport between these husks at almost any time, creating a situation where players cannot trust the game's visuals.

Most of the time, the hallucinations are just that—illusions that cannot harm the Survivors. But if the player controlling The Unknown teleports to one of its husks, a cosmetic distortion instantly becomes an existential threat. This creates an interesting risk-reward dynamic that demands courage while punishing careless approaches. It also allows The Unknown to play devious mind games with Survivors by remaining immobile to impersonate a husk. Barrière-Kucharski pointed out that this pairs exceptionally well with the Insidious Killer perk in Dead by Daylight, which renders the Killer undetectable after remaining stationary for a certain duration.

Small Town Scares in Chapter 31: All Things Wicked

dead by daylight the unknown

The backdrop for All Things Wicked is the new map, Greenville Square, which pays homage to a classic horror setting: small-town Americana. And in terms of inspiration, Behaviour Interactive is borrowing from the best. The map was partially inspired by Stephen King's fictional town of Derry, the setting for IT, which is also featured in the novels Dreamcatcher and Insomnia. Even though these works are not analog-horror in the strictest sense, Greenville Square's movie theater and arcade room are meant to evoke an era of analog media, reminiscent of the late 80s and early 90s.